In recent years the topics investigated in the academic philosophy of art in English have greatly expanded beyond the more traditional foci of issues arising from reflection upon masterworks in literature, music, and the visual arts, the individuation of art forms and media, and the concept of art generally. This century has already seen the publication of monographs and edited collections on topics such as street art and graffiti, pornography as art, games as art; computers as an artistic medium or form; and the ‘wild’ arts of tattooing and body modification. Along with this expansion of topics has been a great deal of thinking that reflects and draws upon recent work in cognitive science. One striking omission, so it seems to me, in these expansions has been research in the anthropology of art. In my reading of contemporary philosophy of art there is only the rarest of mentions of classic works in the anthropology of art, such as those of Frans Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gregory Bateson, and Clifford Geertz. I can’t recall a single mention in the philosophy of art of the most discussed such work of recent decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, nor a fortiori of the more recent work, influential in anthropology, of Philippe Descola and Carlo Severi. What might the consideration of the anthropology of art contribute to the philosophy of art?
The philosopher of art Richard Wollheim offered a rare consideration of this question in the late 1970s. Wollheim counter-posed the question with a second question: What might the philosophy of art contribute to the anthropology of art? An initial response to these two questions goes: suppose there are a number of concepts (Wollheim calls them ‘aesthetic concepts’) instantiated in familiar examples of European arts. Wollheim’s chief example of such a concept is style, but one might include concepts of genres, such as comedy, or aesthetic qualities, such as gracefulness. Unaided by the anthropology of art, a philosopher of art might ask two sorts of questions: 1. What are the conditions under which a work of art instantiates such-and-such aesthetic concept? 2. In what ways, and to what degree, do various aesthetic concepts form part of whatever regulates the making of an artwork? (If a concept regulates an artist’s making of an artwork, Wollheim says that it has ‘psychological reality’.) Suppose further that secure answers are given to questions 1 and 2. Then one contribution of the anthropology of art would be to provide a range of presumptive artworks that do not obviously possess such-and-such aesthetic concept: what aesthetic qualities are possessed by an Asmat shield, or by a nail-embedded nkosi statue? Do Haida carvings exhibit individual style? Is a Wari weaving with its schematic flying shamans comic? The anthropologist can test the philosopher’s analyses and hand the results back to her. But this limited interaction—the philosopher analyzes, the anthropologist tests—is evidently a highly constricted and imaginatively impoverished way of considering the possible mutual contributions of the two paths of reflection on the arts; for as proposed it seems to lack a point other than to bulk up the classifications of the world’s art, and it passes over the possibility that the anthropology of art might offer something that challenges the foundations and assumptions of the philosophy of art. Wollheim goes on to offer a tentative sketch of the aesthetic concept of style, and suggests that part of what might be learned are what he somewhat mysteriously calls the ‘primes’ style, by which I take him to mean elements revealed as common to works by, say, Titian, Dong Qichang, and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, and revealed at the appropriate level of abstraction and in a way relatively undistorted by local prejudices.
Since Gell’s death and the publication of Art and Agency in the late 1990’s, the anthropologist writing in English who has contributed the most impressive reflections on basic concepts in the arts is surely Tim Ingold, the author of numerous books and essays over the past 45 years, including two books published in 2021. Ingold has published a detailed overview of the course of his work (Ingold 2011, pp. 3-14), which arises from the ethnographic work among the Lapps in the 1970’s, and is guided by attempts to undermine the rigid distinction between nature and culture, and to question the distinction between the human and the non-human, especially animals. Here I will set aside much of the trajectory of Ingold’s thinking on artifacts and art, and focus on his recent book Correspondences (2021), which offers a number of previously published short pieces in response to particular works of art, as well as essays aiming to illuminate basic issues raised by particular exhibitions. Before considering this recent work, I’ll sketch Ingold’s core interests on this particular topic: Ingold’s thinking on the arts revolves around two claims with attached programs:
1. Negatively: Much of Western thought, from Aristotle to the present, approaches the nature of the arts, as well as the natures of technologies, tools, and artifacts, through the framework of the ‘hylomorphic’ model of explanation. On this Aristotelean model any entity (a tode ti, a ‘this’), and artifacts and artworks in particular, are understood as unions of two ontologically distinct elements: form (morphe) and matter (hyle). There are many versions of this model, embodying claims of varying strengths, but crucially for Ingold the model embodies a conceptually prior ontological divide, indeed chasm, between form and matter. Further, on this conception form and matter are relatively active and passive respectively, and the presence of form induces the actualization of otherwise latent potentials within matter. Ingold rejects every aspect of this model: the presupposed ontological gulf; the restriction of activity to form; the assumption that order is something ‘outside’ of matter and that is imposed upon matter; and the aim of offering a model of intelligibility of an entity as given in a ‘distanced’ explanation. A great deal of his negative argumentation focuses on the rejection of a particular version of the hylomorphic model wherein the intention of a maker of artifacts plays the role of form, and the materials used in the making play the role of matter. So conceived, the resultant artifact is understood as the realized intention of the maker and thereby fulfills a function as intended by the maker.
2. Positively: Ingold aims to replace the vocabulary and concepts associated with the hylomorphic model (form; matter; intention; function) with a different and novel vocabulary derived from his own analyses of such things as lassoing, basket-making, brick-making, and story telling, and bolstered with analyses and proposals from a range of 20th century philosophers, especially Dewey, Heidegger, Gilbert Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. On Ingold’s account the conception of entities as spatio-temporally delimited hylomorphic unions are replaced by the conception of things as fundamentally temporal and always in process. Firstly, things are fundamentally trajectories without beginning or end. The appropriate image of a thing is a line. Secondly, lines intersect: things exist and persist in the midst of other things; the setting and appropriately complex image of this is not a spatio-temporal grid with entities occupying particular coordinates, but rather a kind of ever-changing ‘meshwork’ with transient nodes where different trajectories intersect. Thirdly, the intersection of trajectories is not well understood as involving a relatively passive surface of one entity acted upon by another entity, but rather an open region wherein each trajectory affects the other, and the trajectories mutually respond to each other; trajectories are neither active nor passive, but are something rightly described in ‘the middle voice’. Surfaces are places of exchange and response among various trajectories. Fourthly, Ingold introduces a kind of master term, ‘correspondence’, both (a) to characterize the processual activities within a region (things ‘correspond’ to each other); and (b) to name the attitude characteristic of a person who grasps something like Ingold’s proposed ontology and approaches the world in its terms. So an artist is said to ‘correspond’ with her materials in making an artwork. Another term for correspondence in action is ‘following’, which again invokes the distinction between Ingold’s favored attitude and the attitude characteristic of someone in the grips of the hylomorphic scheme, one that encourages the idea that making is an imposition of form on passive matter. Ingold suggests that one appropriate way to describe an artist’s making is that in making a work the artist is following her materials.
How can one use this startlingly novel conception with regard to the arts? Unsurprisingly, Ingold rejects much of what typically counts as explanation of the arts, whether in anthropology, art history, or criticism. Such explanation conceives an artwork as a spatio-temporally delimited entity, and then places this entity within some delimited context; a painting is ‘explained’ by placing it within the contexts of an artist’s oeuvre and the broader (but delimited) historical or social or political context. But on Ingold’s account the presupposed unities of artwork, oeuvre, and context are the fictive products of a distanced and impoverished use of the imagination. The point, the anthropological point, is not to explain but to correspond, to follow. So the various pieces in his book Correspondences are fundamentally performative followings of artworks; in Ingold’s words, each piece is “a provisional exercise in observational thinking” that is “held together by lines of correspondence.” (p. 220) They are not ‘about’ works, that is, they are not offered as explications of the meanings of artworks, but rather they are ‘wanderings’, instances of ‘joining with’ works and ‘moving along’ with them (p. 7, with the terminology introduced more generally than just with regard to artworks).
As performative followings, the individual pieces defy summary, something in the way that a Platonic dialogue does; understanding these works is likewise a never-completed product of entering into their process of observation and reflection. To a degree, and despite Ingold’s explicit statement, much of this fits well into aspects of art criticism as it is regularly practiced. Consider Ingold’s piece ‘In the shadow of tree being’, a piece written for a catalog of the works of the Italian conceptual sculptor Giuseppe Penone. Ingold writes that he makes no reference all to Penone or his art (p. 33), but that he attempts something similar to the way Penone “corresponds with trees, bodies, the wind and much more.” (p. 42) The piece itself consists explicitly of a loosely linked set of reflections on body, shadow, touch, time, and art, and is illustrated with two of Penone’s drawings. Surely this is art criticism, and in two ways: the reflections are done in the presence of the illustrated works, and so invite the reader’s reflections on how Ingold’s thoughts illuminate the works; and the very manner and particulars of the unfolding process of Ingold’s writing is proposed as an analogy to Penone’s own manner of making as following, and so is interpretive, albeit in an unusually open-ended way.
If indeed, pace Ingold, Correspondences is a collection of art criticism, one might think this is a symptom of a pervasive problem with Ingold’s self-understanding and manner of presentation of his work. In rejecting the hylomorphic model, Ingold rejects it wholesale. Since he views appeals to intention, function, and even meaning as part of the application of the hylomorphic model to art and making generally, he has no interest in recovering anything of value for these concepts in his correspondence conception. One way of seeing what is problematic about this lack of interest is to consider his few explicit remarks about art generally. In a number of places where Ingold discusses art, he focuses on the historic separation between the arts and technology, and aims to break open the conceptual barrier between the two. In Making art is one of the four ‘A’s’, along with anthropology, archaeology, and architecture; each of these is hitherto long afflicted by association with hylomorphism. Ingold never lingers over the question of what is distinctive about the arts, and the general impression conveyed is that art is a transient phase in the long trajectories of materials. Ingold offers a clue to his conception of art in noting that his piece ‘corresponding’ with Penone was particularly difficult to write: “The scholar’s verbal impulse to explicate continually threatens to unravel the dense weave of experience. But that, of course, is precisely the point. It is why there can be no substitute for art. Do not, then expect an explanation or interpretation, or that I should put the art in its social, cultural or historical context. I will have none of that. My purpose is to think with it.” (Correspondences, pp. 33-4) Here Ingold as usual rejects writing about art that aims at explanation, and he seems to suggest that there is a particular problem generally with writing about art, namely that artworks offer a relatively ‘dense weave of experience’, relative, that is, to other, non-artistic things. This thought is not without precedent: writers such as Wollheim and the art historian Philip Rawson have suggested that artworks have a kind of richness and resonance resulting from the ways in which artists create meaning in working; Wollheim explicitly wrote that the way that meaning enters a work of art is that the artist put it there. Ingold rejects talk of ‘putting’ meaning into a work as yet another malign instance of the hylomorphic conception, as if the artist takes a relatively meaningless artifact and imposes layers of meaning and significance.
Are there then no resources in Ingold’s account to explicate how relatively dense experience arises, and how one might understand the difference between relatively sparse and relatively dense experience? It seems to me again that the piece on Penone offers an instance despite Ingold’s explicit rejection of (hylomorphic) meaning-talk. The first illustration of Penone’s work is of a drawing from 1987, ‘Respirare l’ombra’ [Breathe the shadow]. The work shows a very loosely and organically, faint, triangular outline, in a part of which occurs the Italian title in longhand writing. Inside the triangle near the upper apex is a leaf, out of which billows two long sacks or airy trails suggestive of organic matter and smoke. Ingold says nothing explicit about Penone’s drawing, but opens his piece with the following: “Imagine an inside-out world, where breath solidifies but the lungs are vaporized; where the shadow is a body and the body its shadow” and so forth until concluding with “where the forest ahs us at its fingertips or under its fingernails; where respiration is the rustling of leaves and the nervous system a thornbush.” (p. 33) Now, as noted above, Ingold’s marvelous imaginative prompting here fits comfortably within a standard aspect of art criticism, that is, of giving an evocative explication of some aspect of an artwork in the presence of the work (or at least of an illustration of the work). And further, the imaginative experiment is of a piece with Ingold’s most basic thoughts, as he goes on to indicate two pages later: “There are two halves to every body. One half is made of flesh, and wrapped in skin. That’s the half we can see. The other half, normally invisible to us, is made of air . . . In the woods, too, we tend to see only one half of every tree . . .Every surface is a fold in the fabric of the world.” (p. 35) Recall that for Ingold any entity is more properly thought of as a line, and any surface is a zone of contact and transmission within a meshwork of lines. So one might give a formula for Ingold’s ontology: Any phenomenon is a multiple of mutually affecting lines within an indeterminate field. This suggests that an imaginative project is always available: where there is presumptively an entity affected by other entities within a field, imagine instead that the first entity is rather the outside of a different entity. So instead of, say, me breathing, one imagines air circulating within the pulsating cavities of my lungs. To render, then, in an artwork this inversion of normal perspective is a way of enriching the experience of the phenomena. Is that not part of what Penone’s drawing does, that is, to render a certain Ingold-like imaginative act?
If something like my suggestion is right, then at the very least Ingold has alerted the philosopher of art to a hitherto overlooked kind of procedure for creating artistic meaning. But so long as Ingold rejects any talk of intention, function, and meaning with regard to artworks, it is hard to see how he can make sense of this. It seems to me that the way forward would be, not to simply reject these concepts, but to re-conceptualize their employment in artistic making in light of Ingold’s strictures against hylomorphism. In this project the philosopher of art and this most stimulating of anthropological theorists might learn something from each other.
--John Rapko
References and further relevant readings:
Aristotle, Physics
Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind (1972)
Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987, originally in French 1980)
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2014)
Simon J. Evnine, Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms (2016)
Clifford Geertz, ‘Art as a Cultural System’ in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973)
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (1998)
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935) in Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)
Tim Ingold, “Tool-use, sociality and intelligence” and “Technology, language, intelligence: A reconsideration of basic concepts” in Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, edited by Kathleen R. Gibson and Tim Ingold (1993)
_____The Perception of the Environment (2000)
_____Being Alive (2011)
_____Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (2013)
_____”On Human Correspondence” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (March 2017)
_____”Art and Anthropology for a Sustainable World” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (December 2019)
_____Correspondences (2021)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wild Thought (2021, originally in French 1962)
Beth Preston, A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind (2013)
Philip Rawson, Drawing (1969)
Carlo Severi, The Chimera Principle (2015)
______Capturing Imagination: A Proposal for an Anthropology of Thought (2018)
Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020, originally in French 1964)
Richard Wollheim, “Aesthetics, anthropology and style: some programmatic remarks” in Art in Society (1978), edited by Michael Greenhalgh and Vincent Megaw
_____Painting as an Art (1987)